JamesNoBrakes

I recommend you watch some of the documentaries on nuclear accidents, all of the varied ones that have happened. There are so many opportunities for criticality events besides "in a reactor" during normal operation. Everything from making the fissionable product to storing it to transporting it to loading it to removing it to disposing of it. It's not just about reactor design, there are so many other design safeguards in terms of processes and interfaces that have to exist and many accidents that have happened because they failed. And all of that stuff inherently takes energy to accomplish. Although some of these protections might be rather simple, again, it has to be a "no fail" situation, with the cost of failure so high that extraordinary protections must be in place. Agree on most other points, but a lot of this is what causes nuclear energy to be so expensive and end up having to be subsidized at outrageous amounts. Just like certification of an aircraft, it's not a place to cut corners and that amount of oversight/regulation/complexity is inherently very costly. It's great that it doesn't pump CO into the atmosphere, but all that other stuff that has to happen for the plant to exist often does and the net effect may still be far in the negative in that regard.

The holy grail will be fusion, if we can ever get sustainable net excess energy out of it. To circle back to the guy talking about UFOs using compact fusion reactors, the materials requirements are simply far beyond our capabilities and the energy requirement far beyond what we can create with any small platform. Newer fission technology is possible and may be beneficial, but still not "cheap" or as "clean" with all the baggage that comes with it.

rickair7777

I was trained and worked professionally in the field, they always cover all of the history thoroughly. I even got dragged into a excruciatingly detailed AAR on Fukushima because I still held a nuke designator, despite having been doing other things for a couple decades.

Criticality incidents are essentially non-existent today.

Most of them are only a threat to the people who screwed up, chernobyl being the notable exception.

Yes it's expensive. Future designs would be cheaper to build, operate, maintain, and support.

Regarding "no fail", we actually don't need that. We need failures to be exceptionally rare, and low consequence... that's achievable. Kind of like what we have in 121 aviation in the US right now... nobody claims air travel is perfectly safe but in the current era I think we're at exactly one fatality per how many gazillion pax miles?

rickair7777

As expected, we know the UFOs are not ours but we don't know what they are...

https://www.npr.org/2021/06/04/10032...rnment-inquiry

rickair7777

DoD says they don't have enough data to determine if the whether the observed phenomena can be explained by our current science.

But did not rule out non-terrestrial origins.

https://www.reuters.com/business/aer...ed-2021-06-25/

DropTank

If it's our technology operated by an acronymed department, we can't admit it.
If it's an adversary's technology, and we can ID it, we can't admit it.
Those are two big holes in this report and makes it useless.

rickair7777

They have effectively confirmed it's not USG technology. Common sense confirms that too, if you had something like that which you wanted to keep secret that last thing on earth you do would be to use it to harass the USN to the point where they go public with it and initiate investigations within the USG. Also might get shot. If they needed to test it against our conventional hardware that would be arranged and carefully controlled.

Implausible.

1. We have reasonable SA on their tech, and it's not as good as ours across the board. The tech to do what appears to be happening in those videos is probably not a single niche technical advance... it's almost certainly across-the-aboard advanced (assuming it's not optical illusions, sensor glitches, etc).

2. Taiwan, Hawaii, and Alaska would be under new ownership, to say the least.

3. They wouldn't tip their hand with public demos before game day (see #2).

4. This stuff is happening in SOCAL waters, how did it get there?

5. If it's known enemy hardware that intel is classified and there would not be people giving interviews and releasing cockpit tapes.


All that said I won't rule out that the whole thing is a smokescreen for something we are doing, but it sure is a public goat rodeo if that's case. Or maybe that's point.

MainlineFlyer

As you said earlier, any info about our technological advancement has only gone 100LY or so, add in the fact that whoever recieves it would have to spend an equal amount of time traveling here and you really only have to worry about a 50LY bubble. There aren't that many star systems within that bubble. The speed of light is actually very, very slow on a cosmic scale. Its nearly impossible that it's aliens.

Most likely sensor glitches.

rickair7777

Also worth pointing out that the signal strength of our EM spectrum emissions will be exponentially weak at interstellar ranges, so they'd need some special tech to even notice the signal when it got there.

BoilerUP

Wormholes.

Warp 9 wormholes.